2019 Thorens New Reel to Reel Deck

[watchnerd]

I also find it hard to take expensive new designs seriously if they don't have linear tracking arms. They have their issues, but if you can spend enough money to do one well it seems a better design.

In a digital age, I'm not sure I agree....

If you want perfection, forget LPs entirely. There was a point in trying to perfect the inherent flaws in LP playback when it was the only game in town.

But now that vinyl playback is an exercise in euphonic nostalgia, is "less flawed" playback worth the complexity and cost of linear trackers, air bearing arms, etc?

 

[watchnerd]

linear tracking arms.

Also, this is a great review from 1983 that measures 6 different linear tracking TTs and asks whether the lower distortion, etc, is worth the other trade offs:

https://www.vinylengine.com/ve_download ... dec_83.pdf

 

[Blumlein 88]

In a digital age, I'm not sure I agree....

If you want perfection, forget LPs entirely. There was a point in trying to perfect the inherent flaws in LP playback when it was the only game in town.

But now that vinyl playback is an exercise in euphonic nostalgia, is "less flawed" playback worth the complexity and cost of linear trackers, air bearing arms, etc?

Oh yes, the complexity and cost of linear trackers seems right in line with the nostalgia gig if you ask me. You've probably never had the pleasure of adjusting (and adjusting, and adjusting) a Souther Triquartz. Fantastic linear tracking arm. But every adjustment slightly changes every other (and it has the maximum degrees of adjustments). So you have to wrap your head around that before beginning so you know in which direction each adjustment moves all the others. All the while keeping a picture in your head of where you are trying to go with it. And then get it right. But once you do it works so wonderfully.

Or one could go with one of the air bearing linear arms. Attention to the air supply, and making it not be audible are additive features that increase the addictiveness if you are going all old school LP crazy.

So yes, I want perfection of perfecting playback of the imperfectable. Otherwise no one would still have and use an LP except music historians.

 

[restorer-john]

Oh yes, the complexity and cost of linear trackers seems right in line with the nostalgia gig if you ask me.

Linear trackers are fun and games to keep going. I've got quite a few as I used to pick them up for next to nothing back in the 80s and 90s.

Wait until you want to make a Sharp/Optonica RP-115/107 fully functional again. (both sides play, two individual linear tracking, optically sensed tonearms one plays the top, the other plays the bottom, upside down (reverses the platter rotation of course). Fully random track programmable using IR track sensors all enclosed in a motorized sliding drawer.

When you load the record, it reads both sides for tracks, locks their approx position into memory (via optical encoder wheel) and waits for your instructions.

A few common faults render these machines non-functional and 99% of them would be long gone in landfills by now.

 

[restorer-john]

Also, this is a great review from 1983 that measures 6 different linear tracking TTs and asks whether the lower distortion, etc, is worth the other trade offs:

https://www.vinylengine.com/ve_download ... dec_83.pdf

You can also go to here https://www.americanradiohistory.com/ETI_Magazine-AU.htm and download the December 1983 ETI magazine in its entirety. Page 22 is the linear tracking article.

I guess I was spoilt, I grew up in Australia reading audio reviews to the standards set by Louis Challis and Associates in ETI and Jim Rowe etc in Electronics Australia. The good old days.

 

[Audioagnostic]

Linear trackers are fun and games to keep going. I've got quite a few as I used to pick them up for next to nothing back in the 80s and 90s.

Wait until you want to make a Sharp/Optonica RP-115/107 fully functional again. (both sides play, two individual linear tracking, optically sensed tonearms one plays the top, the other plays the bottom, upside down (reverses the platter rotation of course). Fully random track programmable using IR track sensors all enclosed in a motorized sliding drawer.

When you load the record, it reads both sides for tracks, locks their approx position into memory (via optical encoder wheel) and waits for your instructions.

A few common faults render these machines non-functional and 99% of them would be long gone in landfills by now.

Cool, I don't want one though...

 

[restorer-john]

Cool, I don't want one though

There's one of those in a pile at the front of my parts storeroom- I never bothered to restore it. The 115/107s are nicer with the horizontal design. They are not high performance TTs, but they sure are fun.

 

[Blumlein 88]

Yep I remember seeing the two sided play hang on the wall vertical machines. They always had one on the local record shop.

 

[bennetng]

It is a rebadged Ballfinger: http://www.ballfinger.de/

Superwoman. I guess I can only put a small tape machine like a Nagra IV-S on my shoulder.

 

[GGroch]

Photos of existing Ballfinger models look significantly different from the Thorens, even the drive system looks different, so perhaps it really is co-developed rather than rebadged.

 

[BillG]

 

[RayDunzl]

That looks like it could be a scene from "The War of the Roses".

 

[captain paranoia]

You can also go to here

Thanks for that; I grew up reading UK ETI. I ended up slicing them all up and collecting the articles by category. Audio was 'A' (in A-H).

They published a couple of my designs when I was at university, and even offered me a full-time job...

 

[Pluto]

I'm not impressed, looks far more style over substance

It's hard to tell. I downloaded the detailed information from the Ballfinger site and, in theory, it looks as good as you might expect from the technological limitations of the medium. What is not indicated is something that really separated the men from the boys in tape transport design and manufacture – jitter – or what was termed scrape flutter (or something similar) back in the day. The later Studer, Ampex and Nagra designs had it licked but the rest weren't really in the same league.

I suppose the key question, if you really want the hassle of analogue tape, is whether you are better off seeking out a twenty+ year-old vintage Studer A820 (IMHO, the best transport ever made – available from 2 to 24 track), add the problems of maintaining such a machine these days (obtaining heads, guides, bearings etc.) or buying something like the Ballfinger. Another question must be asked: can you get tape nowadays that is as good as, say, a fresh roll of Agfa PEM368? I know a few small companies are making recording tape, but how good is today's production compared to the time when it was a (small) industry driven by people with a lifetime of experience in making coated chemical products?*

Anyway, come the resurgence of analogue tape recording, I have a few Dolby SR/A units that I kept back for the purpose of handling old recordings. I dare say that their value will increase commensurately

* It was no accident that many companies which excelled in making photographic film also produced the best recording tapes.

 

[sergeauckland]

It's hard to tell. I downloaded the detailed information from the Ballfinger site and, in theory, it looks as good as you might expect from the technological limitations of the medium. What is not indicated is something that really separated the men from the boys in tape transport design and manufacture – jitter – or what was termed scrape flutter (or something similar) back in the day. The later Studer, Ampex and Nagra designs had it licked but the rest weren't really in the same league.

I suppose the key question, if you really want the hassle of analogue tape, is whether you are better off seeking out a twenty+ year-old vintage Studer A820 (IMHO, the best transport ever made – available from 2 to 24 track), add the problems of maintaining such a machine these days (obtaining heads, guides, bearings etc.) or buying something like the Ballfinger. Another question must be asked: can you get tape nowadays that is as good as, say, a fresh roll of Agfa PEM368? I know a few small companies are making recording tape, but how good is today's production compared to the time when it was a (small) industry driven by people with a lifetime of experience in making coated chemical products?*

Anyway, come the resurgence of analogue tape recording, I have a few Dolby SR/A units that I kept back for the purpose of handling old recordings. I dare say that their value will increase commensurately

* It was no accident that many companies which excelled in making photographic film also produced the best recording tapes.

We can argue over whether the Studer A820 or the Ampex ATR100 had the best tape transport.....I was a fan of the ATRs, but then I was working for Ampex when they first came out. Nevertheless, your comments are spot on about scrape flutter and tape quality. I was also a fan of Scotch 206 and Ampex Grand Master at the time, but never had much experience of Agfa tape. The main problem I found with all tapes was the batch-batch consistency that required a realign of the record side when starting a new batch. How good Agfa was in that regard I don't know But then, keeping the tape machines aligned was a daily chore.

S.

 

[watchnerd]

I

I suppose the key question, if you really want the hassle of analogue tape, is whether you are better off seeking out a twenty+ year-old vintage Studer A820 (IMHO, the best transport ever made – available from 2 to 24 track), add the problems of maintaining such a machine these days (obtaining heads, guides, bearings etc.) or buying something like the Ballfinger. Another question must be asked: can you get tape nowadays that is as good as, say, a fresh roll of Agfa PEM368? I know a few small companies are making recording tape, but how good is today's production compared to the time when it was a (small) industry driven by people with a lifetime of experience in making coated chemical products?*

Re the machines:

Prices are going up constantly, but these days:

$1-2k for a good condition Otari, TASCAM or Technics
$2-3k for a great condition Revox PR-99
$5k for a Studer A807 or A810

All of which were TOTL in their respective classes at the end of the tape era and, in some ways, better built than the Ballfinger. But, as you say, spares.

Re tape:

It's challenging to compare then versus now because there are no "fresh rolls" of vintage tape because all of it has suffered to some extent from aging over time. We don't have a time machine, so can't compared the quality of vintage Ampex back in the day to modern tapes, but in my personal experience, having bought NOS still in wrapper vintage tape, the old stuff hasn't aged well and these days is not as good as modern fresh creations, both physically and for attributes like print through.

 

[Pluto]

having bought NOS still in wrapper vintage tape, the old stuff hasn't aged well and these days is not as good as modern fresh creations, both physically and for attributes like print through.

Are you saying that typical modern tape has better print-through performance than typical NOS, sealed vintage stuff? But can it stand the high level that PEM368 revelled in? Would the print-through performance of sealed NOS tape deteriorate with time?* I would imagine that this could well be a function of the conditions under which the tape has been stored over the years.

Print-through is a deviously tricky beast to assess owing to its subjective annoyance value not altogether correlating to the numbers.

* In other words, would modern stock be any better or worse than the stuff made in 1985 and tested in 1985?

 

[amirm]

Print-through is a deviously tricky beast to assess owing to its subjective annoyance value not altogether correlating to the numbers.

Was there a standardized test to measure it?

 

[watchnerd]

Are you saying that typical modern tape has better print-through performance than typical NOS, sealed vintage stuff? But can it stand the high level that PEM368 revelled in? Would the print-through performance of sealed NOS tape deteriorate with time?* I would imagine that this could well be a function of the conditions under which the tape has been stored over the years.

Print-through is a deviously tricky beast to assess owing to its subjective annoyance value not altogether correlating to the numbers.

* In other words, would modern stock be any better or worse than the stuff made in 1985 and tested in 1985?

Yeah, I'm saying all of that, including based on published specs, experience with modern tape, and experience with NOS tape I've bought stored under who-knows-what conditions.

The general consensus on TapeHeads is that modern stuff is a far better bet than NOS stuff made in the mid-1980s, on average.

 

[watchnerd]

Was there a standardized test to measure it?

I don't know if it's standardized, but print through as a set of specs that seems to be commonly used measured in dB at the recommended bias setting and a given level.

See page 3 of:

https://www.recordingthemasters.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/fiche_sm900_rtm_26_07_2016-web.pdf